Chapter 3

Saturday April 22

There’s a quote everyone likes to throw around from Sherlock Holmes: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” TV writers love to hold it up as the holy grail of deductive insight - the most indispensable tool in a master detective’s arsenal.

It’s bullshit.

Enumerating all conceivable permutations and decisively determining which are possible may work for gamblers and mathematicians, but in a real investigation, you don’t know how much you don’t know. It’s hubris to think that you’ve considered every angle - that a black hat can’t come up with some exploit you missed. Honestly? Sherlock Holmes wasn’t the world’s greatest detective because of his insight and discipline. It’s because he had a writer with a knack for making Deus Ex Machina entertaining.

As for me - clever but fallible Lexi Green - I’m going to do what Sherlock claims he never does: guess. I’m going to put together a scenario based on what I know, and then hold it up to the light and look for holes. And my current guess is that Laurel Reiser is the leader of a cult.

She went from being a nobody to being talked about all over the internet overnight, and that talk includes a lot of spiritual-sounding mumbo jumbo. But she’s hidden. She doesn’t have a web page for her holy text or manifesto or whatever. There are gatekeepers, and only a select few are allowed to talk to her.

Even Hunter and Imogen - who may be true believers but don’t seem to be followers - talked about her in mystical metaphors. Attracting followers through drug-enhanced sex is certainly one of the usual boxes that she checks.

On the other hand, she’s missing a few typical characteristics, too. Cult leaders are almost always men, for one. And they are always charismatic and assertive, which is not the sense I get about Laurel. Maybe I’ll feel differently when I meet her. I haven’t heard any grandiose titles applied to her, like “High Priestess” or “Prophet”. Now that I think of it, though, Hunter did use the word “oracle”.

But why do I even care, right? I wasn’t hired to investigate Laurel. But I was hired to find a missing person whose trail ends at her, and I’ve got multiple sources who’ve called her dangerous and immoral.

Imogen had urged me to “take the blue pill” - a reference to the movie The Matrix. She was saying I should accept the world as it seems on the surface and resist peeling back the layers to learn what’s really going on. She probably meant well, but is there actually anyone who, without the benefit of hindsight, would ever take that advice? Not this girl.

I’ve asked a researcher at the firm to check into any possible money angles - charities established in her name, or similar.

Once I reached Flagstaff, I tried calling Laurel to arrange a meeting. What I got was her assistant’s voicemail, with a message making it perfectly clear that a return call would depend on leaving a detailed and convincing message. I said the usual - private eye, missing person, she might have information. There was no point in trying to disguise my motives since her father almost certainly told her to expect me. I’m not holding my breath.

Her apartment building is nothing too fancy - typical college town housing. There’s an 8x11 printout taped inside the glass on the main door that proclaims, in very large letters, “No unsolicited visitors.” I managed to slip inside when some resident was leaving, but to my surprise, there was an attractive man in his twenties sitting in a dining chair next to her apartment door.

I decided to try to bullshit my way in. “Hi!” I told him. “I’m here to see Ms. Reiser. I’m expected.”

He doubted me immediately but replied cordially. “Name, please?”

“Lexi Green. From Hughes, Connolly, and Roth.”

He looked at his tablet. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t have an appointment for you listed. You’ll have to reschedule.”

“Well that makes no sense...,” I said, and began making a show of looking through my phone. “I’m sure it was for now. Let me just find the email.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am...”

“I only need a minute of her time. I’ll be super-quick, I promise.”

He stood up. “You’ll have to reschedule,” he said firmly. There was nothing threatening about the gesture, but he certainly had a military-like presence to him, which I’m sure he intended. It was surprising how strongly I was affected by his air of authority.

“I understand. I’m sorry for making a fuss,” I said. I handed him a business card. “Will you please pass this along to her in case she lost my contact info?”

Thanks to Eldon’s notebook, I know Laurel’s license plate number, so I hid a GPS tracker on her car and staked out the parking lot. She never came out of her apartment while I was there.

The school has a room reserved tomorrow for a meeting of a fan club about some manga. Laurel is the president, secretary, and treasurer. In the morning I’ll go check out the room and see if I can hide some cameras in there.

Sunday April 23

Well, that was not what I expected from a manga fan club. I did slip some cameras into the meeting room before anyone showed up. The purpose of the club was for Laurel to teach a bunch of women how to give blowjobs. Mystical blowjobs. As far as I can tell, the blowjobs were supposed to give them insight into the future. Hunter had pretty much told the truth when he said that Laurel was popular because of her “cock-sucking oracle technique”.

Apart from Laurel and her assistant - a thirty-something woman in business attire - there were four women and probably eight men. Only one of the women was college-age; I’d guess the others to be twenty-eight, forty, and fifty-five. The men were all in their twenties and all attractive.

The women all sat side by side on the towels and yoga mats they had brought while Laurel began a nervous lecture on what she had observed last time. The men hung out, some watching the lecture, others checking their social media streams or playing mobile games.

Laurel’s lecture - and her one-on-one advice later - made absolutely no sense to me. Sometimes it sounded like they were talking about art composition, other times pharmacology, and still others astrology. I’m pretty sure she made an important point involving Alice in Wonderland once. There were words and phrases from non-English languages, but I’ll be damned if I know which ones.

She only spoke for five or ten minutes, and then her students stripped above the waist and got to work sucking dick. Laurel watched them and offered criticisms that, again, made no sense to me. Sometimes the women made weird gestures with their hands, which also needed to be corrected.